Chancellor’s claim to be helping trade met with disbelief in England and Wales amid soaring staff costs, energy bills and other overheads

Emma Harrison has begun to wonder how her business will survive in recent weeks. The managing director of the Three Hills pub in Bartlow, Cambridgeshire, is struggling to see how she will make a profit after examining the impact of her rising tax bill.

“I’m really terrified about this coming year,” Harrison says. “We’re a well-run pub, we’ve won lots of awards, but this is going to be really hard.”

People able to buy homes previously beyond budget, aided by rising wages and looser affordability tests

First-time buyers are taking out larger mortgages than ever before as rising wages and looser affordability tests allow them to buy properties that were previously beyond their budget.

The average first-time buyer borrowed £210,800 in the year to September, a record high, according to analysis by Savills, the property agent.

Thinktank says Rachel Reeves’s budget had started to assure bond markets about fiscal approach

• Rachel Reeves’s test from the bond markets starts now

The “premium” that the UK pays to borrow money compared with its international peers may be coming to an end as markets grow more confident about the government’s plans, a thinktank has suggested.

The Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) said that the chancellor Rachel Reeves’s announcement in the autumn budget that she would be more than doubling the UK’s financial headroom by 2030 from £9.9bn to £22bn had begun to assure bond markets about Labour’s fiscal approach.